Prerelease 1.201C (Nebula Options, Low Energy Mode tweaks, cmd station tweaks)

[AcidWeb]

Hypothetically lets presume that all patches are zip files that contain files what was changed.
In main directory is a small XML file that contain current version number.
Updater reads that file and download patch (or patches if more that one upgrade was released) then decompress them in order using some included decompressing programs and overwrite files + change XML version file.

That type of system will be simpler, will not use system directories (it using only AI War directory) and will be multi platform.

[x4000]

But, see -- most people want to install AI War into Program Files or some other similar directory.  And even the subdirectories have strange permissions that require admin escalation to install on Vista.  Even when running the game on Vista, if it tries to log dumps or savegames to its own folder it will crash and die, which is why I have to use the local user's application folder to do that sort of thing.

It's not an insurmountable problem, but it will require some different logic for various OSes, and is a bit outside the scope of what I can really tackle at the moment with everything else that is going on.  And as soon as someone is on a funky setup that I did not anticipate, then it's broken unless they manually download and install a zip file.

I don't know -- that sort of solution is certainly workable if I can get around the permissions thing (will just take some MSDN reading for me), but that's the situation at present.

[Echo35]

Hypothetically lets presume that all patches are zip files that contain files what was changed.
In main directory is a small XML file that contain current version number.
Updater reads that file and download patch (or patches if more that one upgrade was released) then decompress them in order using some included decompressing programs and overwrite files + change XML version file.

That type of system will be simpler, will not use system directories (it using only AI War directory) and will be multi platform.

Windows 7 (And in some instances, Vista) REALLY bitches at you for trying to copy stuff into root directories. When I unzip AI War patches, I have to go and confirm permission several times in order to make it copy.

[x4000]

Hypothetically lets presume that all patches are zip files that contain files what was changed.
In main directory is a small XML file that contain current version number.
Updater reads that file and download patch (or patches if more that one upgrade was released) then decompress them in order using some included decompressing programs and overwrite files + change XML version file.

That type of system will be simpler, will not use system directories (it using only AI War directory) and will be multi platform.

Windows 7 (And in some instances, Vista) REALLY bitches at you for trying to copy stuff into root directories. When I unzip AI War patches, I have to go and confirm permission several times in order to make it copy.

Yeah.  There is some sort of backdoorish permissions escalation that Windows Installer has which allows it to do stuff without user intervention in those folders if using MSI/MSP.  But that makes everyone kind of locked into their system (which is kind of brittle and horrible in a lot of ways), or forced to use non-system folders to install software (which defeats the purpose of Program Files to start with).

[AcidWeb]

Mea culpa! I'm forgotten that not everyone disable that few seconds after system installation  

[Echo35]

Mea culpa! I'm forgotten that not everyone disable that few seconds after system installation 

I'm not talking about UAC, Windows 7 is just like, give me permission to copy or I don't know what to do. Ok now give me permission to overwrite the folders. Ok now give me permission to overwrite the files. Ok, are you sure you want to do all that? And then it copies. And UAC would also be bugging me about now but I disabled that